Christina H.

Christina is a senior at Mainland Regional High School who’s passionate about using technology to improve outcomes for underrepresented communities, especially women and children. She is a 2024 researcher with the Harvard OpenBio Student Research Institute, where she worked with a Columbia University PhD student to model the mechanical behavior of the non-human primate uterus using CAD and finite element analysis software. She was also a paid intern at the Federal Aviation Administration, developing and debugging test cases for physics-based flight simulations. Previously, Christina was selected as an intern at the Yale School of Medicine’s Center for Clinical Investigation, where she co-designed multilingual and accessible EMR prototype features to enhance pediatric clinical trial recruitment. She has also conducted machine learning research at Washington University in St. Louis, building an LSTM-based fake news detector. At school, Christina is the Co-Founder and Co-President of the STEM for Change Club and her school’s Girls Who Code chapter. She led the first school team to win the NASA Cubes in Space Challenge, launching three experiments to space and later analyzing results in collaboration with a microbiologist at Stockton University. Her coding projects range from data science for social good—investigating the link between toilet access and girls’ education in South Asia—to collaborating on an interactive chatbot that teaches sustainable engineering to kids using recyclable materials. Outside of STEM, Christina is first singles on the varsity tennis team and an oboist with the Philadelphia Youth Orchestra, having performed at the Kimmel Center.